Month: February 2017

Given that it is quite a while since we last met, I am going to take you back in time by about four months. After a slightly tricky start – we had experienced a touch of frost on the far field for the first time since the vines were tiny little twigs – we have enjoyed the best growing season that I can remember. The sun didn’t exactly shine right the way through flowering, but the rain stayed away, allowing an excellent fruit set and we are consequently entering the business end of the season with plenty of fruit all over the place.

Simple enough? Not a chance. Repeat visitors will be aware that vines are very much like pandas in that I have literally no idea how they made it through the annals of time and vagaries of evolution to the present day intact. Vines will catch anything that is passing and absolutely revel in this sickly role throughout the English “Summer” time. As luck would have it, we enjoyed some drier and warmer weather towards the end of the growing season which allowed us to beat the mildew into submission and we were close to declaring victory on the eve of harvest. Which brings us to about four months ago.

We have already picked the majority of our German varieties, which are always the earliest, but at this point, we have picked them two weeks earlier than ever and the sugar levels are excellent. As is the ripeness* in general, which is of constant concern in English winemaking. The French varieties are looking great and we are anticipating a bumper harvest and an easy time in the winery (more on this next time).

*Not in common with much of the rest of the wine producing world, here in the frigid north, one generally picks the grapes as late as one may get away with it, as opposed to whipping them off in the middle of August (and even in the middle of the night) before they all turn into raisins in the searing heat. Stoic English pickers usually wear hats and gloves and are prone to mutiny if you offer them anything other than a pint of tea and a bowl of soup for lunch.

It is because of this clean and bountiful crop that we find our author bathed in the early evening sunshine at the bottom of the far field clutching a shotgun, ready to meter out some old fashioned justice to hungry birds intent on a putting a dent in this season’s harvest. Old hands here will be aware that this is about as idle as threats get – I couldn’t damage a barn door with a gun, short of actually hitting the door with the gun – so it’s probably as well that we aren’t afflicted with the huge swarms of Starlings that, given half a chance, would absolutely demolish the carefully tended crops of our wine producing colleagues in the South East.

The worst that we have to deal with is the occasional gang of pigeons, and they generally don’t appear mob handed, nor do they seem to have a particular predilection for grapes; that or our particular pigeons are full of the leavings from the local kebab house. Whatever the case, we rarely suffer much damage from the local fauna, but in the calm that comes before the big pick, a vineyard owner must find himself something to do and ensuring that not a single grape ends up inside a pigeon seems like as good a thing as any at the end of September.

Climbing back into his decidedly ancient pick up, our protagonist marvels yet again that it bursts into life as he turns the key in the ignition. The last time that we met, our pick up was in a parlous state. As well as being in about as far from showroom condition that it is possible for a vehicle to be, it had obstinately elected to stop running altogether and was pursuing a new career as a trailer, being dragged around by an even older tractor. This was doing some major damage to the air of absolutely rigid professionalism that we cultivate around everything else here, so I was keen to revive it.

As luck would have it, I am in the possession of the telephone number of a technically minded chap who is far too polite for his own good and was willing talk me through coaxing a couple of more trips around the estate out of the old girl. And lo, at some point around spring of last year, it burst into life and had been happily running on almost all of its cylinders since. The cylinders part is important, because a good chunk of the fuel that the engine was dumping into the wonky one was making its way into the exhaust and exploding there instead, causing regular and thunderous back fires.

This was obviously a problem if we wanted to get the dog or the children within one hundred yards of the pick up, but it also turned it into a sort of mobile bird scarer. As soon as I switched off and climbed out to carry out a spot of bird scaring, I was inevitably greeted by absolute and complete silence and a sky perfectly devoid of ravenous avian intruders. This was going splendidly, right up until the last and greatest of all backfires took a good chunk of the exhaust with it.

Back to life as a trailer? Not a bit of it! It obviously sounds even worse now, but faithfully delivered tonne after tonne of grapes to the winery with nary a whimper. Okay, there was quite a lot a whimpering, but shifting the grapes is no longer a two man job, so I’m calling that a win.